


The King and I

by MirabileDictu



Category: Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel, The World's End (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 03:29:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4771757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirabileDictu/pseuds/MirabileDictu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-<i>The World's End</i>, set in the world of Emily St. John Mandel's dystopian novel <i>Station Eleven</i>. An angry Kirsten wanders away from the Symphony and crosses paths with Gary, King of the Humans... along with a few blanks. (For Kirsten, this is pre-St. Deborah on the Water and the Prophet.) (Don't ask me how this makes sense with their respective timelines and locations. That's why it's a fanfic, okay.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The King and I

**Author's Note:**

> _I'm frightened by the devil / And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid -- Joni Mitchell, 'A Case of You'_
> 
> _Then how can it be said I am alone, / When all the world is here to look on me? -- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream_

They'd been turned away from the last town by guards, men with guns flanking a roadblock made of concrete slabs and sacks of dirt. A couple of the others muttered that the guns probably weren't loaded, and the conductor tried to negotiate -- explained they were on the way to a performance, offered to trade food for passage through -- but the men shook their heads. Their sunglasses reflected the flat pale landscape, the way the Symphony had come.

The town was called Bento. Somebody laughed at that -- maybe the first cello, it was difficult to tell.

On the road out, Sayid spoke to a couple of Bento people who were out on patrol. They were friendlier than the guards. He'd come back with a tale they'd told him about the next town over, something about a rumour that the people who lived there were _robots_ , of all things. Apparently the locals kept away, apparently that explained the roadblock. Kirsten didn't listen properly. She was boiling with anger at the sheer stupid futility of it all -- the fall of civilisation, and still people were shutting each other out, appointing themselves as dictators. She wasn't bothered about changing the route -- it was what they were used to, for one reason or another -- but the pathetic superiority of the guards, their smirks as they watched the caravans turn, had made something snap.

Now Kirsten is walking. She'd told the others she might be a while. August's eyes were on her, worrying, and she'd shrugged with a nonchalance she didn't feel, saying she needed some time alone. He'd said that if it got dark he'd be out looking for her, that she should head south-east and not stray from the track, and she'd given a brief smile that felt tight and fake. If he noticed, he didn't say anything.

In truth, her shoulders are rigid with tension. She feels like the pressure of the anger she's holding would make her shake if she tried to sit still. She's hot and there's a wet sheen of sweat on her back and her face, and she knows her clothes smell -- of that, and of woodsmoke and cooked fish -- but it's better to keep moving.

\---

The house has been ransacked probably three or four times, but she expected that; it's just off a main route, after all. She's got the rag she uses as a mask pulled up over her face, but it's not really that dusty, just a thin sandy layer coating the furniture. She can see straight away there are no magazines -- no books, either, though torn-out pages from an encyclopaedia or something litter the floor.

When she sees movement in the corner of her eye, her reflexes are instant. There's only a split-second snap of white-hot terror before she goes for her knife and spins on her heel. She's done this so many times, only to find a ball of dust blowing across the floor or a rat skittering away, and there is a moment of horrible jarring panic as she realises someone's there, someone's actually there, and a figure flashes towards her and time does that thing, its silent slow-motion thing, and she's hit him, she can see she's hit him and -- oh, God, what if it's one of the Symphony -- but no, it's a teenage boy she doesn't recognise, a boy with a dirty face, and she doesn't understand what's happening because the knife has hit him in the arm but he isn't bleeding -- the knife has cleaved his arm so thoroughly that it's hanging at the wrong angle, and she's falling forwards because it's hollow and everything is blue and --

\-- someone is pulling her off him, saying "Jesus Christ", and standing her up, and shaking her too hard. His face is mostly covered -- a hat, and a mask like hers but it's black --- but he pulls that off and looks her in the eyes. "Are you okay? Sit down. Come on."

"Who are you?" she says, " _what_ are you?" She's looking over his shoulder at the boy, and there are others behind him now, three of them, but that scarcely seems important because he's _unclipping_ his arm, twisting it, righting it, clipping it back into place. He doesn't look angry. His expression is kind of blank.

"One, I'm Gary. Two, I'm not a robot. Well, neither are they. It's sort of complicated. But I swear, you don't need to be frightened of us. We're the underdogs."

"What, like that's who you are? Or that's what you call yourselves? The Underdogs?"

"That's a good name for the band, Steve. Write that down." It's obviously an in-joke, one so well-worn his voice tails off at the end of the sentence as though he doesn't need to finish it, but there's something pained on his face when he says it. Why would anyone look so sad while telling a joke? She doesn't ask. It doesn't seem that important. She just sits down.

\---

She realises that she's surprised, but not really _surprised_. This world has made her weary, and the things she's seen -- well. This certainly counts among the strangest, but it isn't the worst, it's definitely not the most horrible, and it doesn't compare to whatever hovers on the edges of her lost memories of Year One.

Gary tries to explain. It's hard to follow what he's saying, but Kirsten finds the way he talks endearing, so she doesn't say anything. He's childlike, making a lot of hand gestures, and she gets the impression he's excited to be speaking to a fellow human, as if it's something he hasn't done for a long time. But the story is well-worn, she can tell, a thing he takes out again and again, tracing its lines for reassurance. After all these years of wandering, performing, remembering, she understands that.

This is what she remembers afterwards: Gary is human. The boys aren't. The boys aren't robots. But they're a bit like robots. Like he said, it's complicated. The important thing is, they're harmless.

"This all makes sense, right?" He smiles and raises his eyes skywards when he says this, meaning: nothing about this world makes sense anymore; why should this be any different.

She grasps for an inane question. "Why are their faces painted blue?"

"Well, why have you got a Spider-Man backpack?"

It's a good comeback. He's screwing his face up like a pissed-off kid, now. She fights an urge to giggle, is immediately disgusted with herself for even thinking the word _giggle_.

\---

Kirsten isn't attracted to him, but it's a long time since she's met someone with such expressive eyes. It's hard to look away from his face - it seems to shift constantly, the way light picks across water, creating new shapes with every tiny movement.

"You have to imagine the marshmallows," Gary says, prodding the fire he's lit. Kirsten isn't really sure whether she remembers marshmallows. She might have eaten them when she was younger, but then again that might just be the accumulation of other people's memories, a thousand paens to s'mores from all the makeshift fires she's sat around.

The light is fading. The boys are sitting a few metres away. They're still, but their eyes are open. Kirsten finds it unnerving -- the contrast between them, their smooth faces and mechanical gestures, and Gary, who seems somehow more alive than anyone she knows.

"Don't you get lonely?"

"Loneliness is relative," says Gary, but he says it like he's quoting someone else, or reciting something he's been telling himself but doesn't believe. "You're never alone with a robot army," and he gives a very dry smile that doesn't extend to his eyes.

Kirsten thinks that surely it's the opposite -- you're _always_ alone with a robot army.

"We're not robots," says the first boy in a churlish voice.

"Yeah, sorry mate," says Gary, at the same time as Kirsten says, "oh, I'm sorry," even though it wasn't her that said it.

They're all silent for a second, and then she asks, "What does that mean though, really? That loneliness is relative?"

"Oh, I don't fucking know," says Gary. He jams the stick he was holding into the fire. His face is set in that mask again, screwed up and petulant.

\---

They talk about the world before the fall. Gary's twenty years older than her, and he remembers things she can't. He's about as hazy on the internet as she is -- "I never really got into it, to be honest. Wish I had now" -- but he talks for a while about a game he had on his phone called 'Snake', tries to draw it in the dirt, a thing that looks like a boxed-in maze. He talks wistfully about music, hums some songs she's never heard of. Kirsten thinks of all the songs she's never heard of, lost in the fall.

When she talks about the Symphony he listens, rapt. He's less interested in what they do than who they are -- which instrument each of them plays, how long she's known them, how they joined the group in the first place. When she talks about them, she finds herself getting into it, being the storyteller, seeing her friends from an outsider's perspective. His face is hungry.

\---

It's getting darker. She notices that the boys are standing up, now. They look particularly eerie like that, backlit by the setting sun.

"Come with us." It's a stupid idea, she knows it as soon as she says it, but he's shaking his head already.

"I can't. I -- ah. I have to protect them. I can't leave them behind, and nobody else will have us, I know that by now. It's just this sort of -- thing, that I have. Because of something that happened way back. You know?"

He looks at her like he's expecting a challenge, but she thinks she understands. She nods, just once.

Then, when they've got up, as he's sort of stumbling while re-lacing his boot, he says "but you should meet me here. I could come and see you acting." ("Acting" is accompanied by a gesture that she remembers August once calling "jazz hands".) "Next time you're in the area, I mean. If you're ever in the area, I... mean."

"I don't know if we'll ever be in the area, to be honest. We kinda got thrown out of Bento."

He chuckles. "Fucking Bento." The boys are walking away now, becoming silhouettes. "But if you ever are, seriously --"

"How will I know if you're here? Am I just going to say, oh, has anyone seen the guy with the --" she glances at the boys' retreating backs and lowers her voice, just in case "-- _r-words_ recently?"

"Oh, you'll know," he says. "They call me the King." The grin this time is what she thinks people call _wolfish_ , and it reaches up to his eyes at last. When he pulls his mask up, she can still see it in the creases of his face. He gives a sort of salute; reaches his palm, open, up to the edge of his hat. Then he is gone.

\---

On the walk back to the Symphony she wonders whether she should have said something about _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and Shakespeare and the weird synchronicity of it -- King Lear, or Oberon, the fairy king, and how she plays Titania, but she doesn't think he'd have appreciated it, somehow. It occurs to her that she's always wondering whether she should say things, always weighing up whether her thoughts are too unwieldy to explain.

She's maybe fifty steps away from the caravans when August jogs out to meet her, smiling with relief plain on his face. "You make any new friends?" he shouts. When he reaches her, he gives her a playful shove. "Spot any of those robots?"

She shakes her head and takes his arm.


End file.
